Category Archives: Lit Quotes

KCRW’s Bookworm: Zadie Smith 11/9

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Zadie Smith’s become sort of the young female version of Phillip Roth: for a while there it was really (REALLY) popular to hate her and her books, or to talk about how you just didn’t get the hype. That was during her first two books (“White Teeth” and “The Autograph Man”), BOTH of which I LOVED. Then her third book “On Beauty” came out and suddenly all the Zadie haters faded away and she became the critics’ darling. Sadly, I did not like that book very much. It was not nearly in the same league as the first two, in my opinion, and I certainly didn’t understand the hype this time around.

So if you’re like me, put aside the fact that On Beauty is one of the primary topics of this podcast, because once you get past that, it was a really great conversation. Much deeper/more insightful than many author chats I’ve read/listened to.

Smith said this book was intended to be a traditional English novel / a tribute to her idols/elders, that she hadn’t done before. She commented that she’s always told by people “your books are about the search for identity” and she always wants to say “yes, the realization that it’s a POINTLESS search for identity.”

They talked about David Foster Wallace and how you have to get beneath the surface. That it’s very easy for critics/readers to dismiss him due to his smart-aleck, wise-ass exterior, but that what’s he’s really trying to figure out is what truth is.

She talked about how the new modern model of a reader is that of a film watcher “here I am, entertain me” whereas the classical model of a reader (which is mostly lost at this point) was that of an amateur musician, sitting down in front of a piece of music you don’t know, that may have elements your skills will not let you comprehend, yet putting forth the effort, using all your skills to try and learn it and get to know it and the more you give, the more you will get back. I agree, and that evolution into stupidity is a real loss we’ve suffered (and continue to) as this world has evolved.
As Silverblatt replied: “This was once known: the reading of novels and poetry was instruction in how to be human.”

She also talked about how to be a good writer is more than just craft; you must educate your consciousness. When you write a bad book, it’s not just that the book was bad, but that you were a bad author of it, that you failed in your writing.

She disputes the (in her words) “currently very popular” idea that the whole point of life is to “find out who you are.” And said that the idea behind On Beauty was that it was full of people terrified of becoming less of who they are by pursuing what’s most meaningful to them.

Memphis Liner Notes.

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This came wrapped around my copy of “A Good Day Sailing” and I love it:

This record is a five-track EP by a group called Memphis. But they aren’t really a group, more of an idea or a thought you might have when you’re at work watching the rain fall and wondering what you might have been. No forget that. That’s not Memphis; Memphis is a place, a kind of haze, a southern place maybe but not the city itself, somewhere further south where you are a stranger and the evenings are endless. No, that’s romance. That’s a lie. Memphis is music to fall asleep to and to wake up to and to break up to. Memphis is music for the masses though you’re one of the few who will ever read this. Memphis is me and my friend Chris who I love and it’s an attempt to reflect beauty back into the world, and it’s a pop song. Memphis is a pop song…or two.

I’ve got to get Jess Walter’s latest onto my reading pile.

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Even if not for all the fabulous reviews it (The Zero) is getting, for the fact that he posted this hilarious quote on the Powell’s guest author blog:

To me, golf is like karaoke: the only thing more pathetic than being bad at it is being good at it.

That paragraph also started with this hilarity: I once broke my collarbone in a golf tournament. Technically, I suppose, the injury was more of a gin-drinking accident than a golf accident, but it still says a lot about my relationship to the game that it’s my fondest golf memory.

Like Synesthesia, but Tactile-Based Rather than Color.

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“What could be more dry than a statistic? More indifferent than a number? To be treated like a number, in common parlance, is to become an entirely replaceable part — an object lesson in depersonalization.”

Two is solid and tingly, like the Liberty Bell….Eight is rough and hard like a stone, and 10 is smooth like a pebble on the beach. Nine…seems ready not only to ring but to shatter and burst like a fruit. [quoting Richard Friedberg]

–“Mind Over Matter, Conversations with the Cosmos”, by K.C. Cole.

So Beautiful It Hurts.

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But you know what really broke my heart? When you described yourself to me to make sure. Because of how you somehow diminished yourself into one single sentence, in parentheses on top of that (“Quite tall, long curly messy hair, glasses…”). If you really feel yourself to be in parentheses — at least let me squeeze into them as well and let the whole world remain outside. Let the world only be the element outside the parentheses that will multiply us on the inside.
–from “Be My Knife” by David Grossman.

Yearning, and bittersweet, and oh so very, very sexy. It’s almost hard to read it in public.

Alcohol. Yum.

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Thomas knew he was drinking too much but could see no good reason to quit or slow down. Alcohol was an old and valued friend, most reliable, always ready to jog your elbow, recollecting hidden memories, specifically the pitch and swing of actual language, language as it was spoken…

Florette was sympathetic toward the bored or the lonely or the melancholic, but not toward drinking as a solution. He tried to explain to her that drinking usually increased loneliness or melancholy but was a specific against boredom because alcohol cast a cockeyed light on your surroundings. That which was dull became vivid. That which was static became a whirlwind. Grief became hilarity because the world was skewed.
–from Forgetfulness, by Ward Just.

He’s thinking about Antarctica, and Texas. I’m thinking about Life.

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…we drive for fifteen minutes and see nothing but rock and brush. The brush looks dead; Ms. Ngyuen informs me that it comes alive in the spring. Like Baffin Island, I imagine, the living things live their whole lives in that narrow time when conditions are favorable, and all the rest of the time they wait.
–as thought by the title character of China Mountain Zhang by Maureen McHugh.

“Reminder” of the Day.

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Revolution gives ordinary people the false belief that they can remake not just themselves, their country, and the whole wide world but human nature itself. That such grand designs always fail, that human nature is immutable, that everyone’s idea of perfection is different — these truths are all for a time forgotten.
–Mark Bowden “Guests of the Ayatollah”

A quote for this dreary Monday.

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Some measure of generality must be present in any high-class theorem, but too much tends inevitably to inspidity. ‘Everything is what it is, and not another thing’, and the differences between things are quite as interesting as their resemblances. We do not choose our friends because they embody all the pleasant qualities of humanity, but because they are the people they are. And so in mathematics; a property common to too many objects can hardly be very exciting, and mathematical ideas also become dim unless they have lenty of individuality.
–GH Hardy “A Mathematician’s Apology”